Essay: Collins' coming out could accelerate gay acceptance

Shannon Ryan, Tribune reporter

There was a time, in 1947 and before, when the mere presence of an African-American on a Major League Baseball team was enough to shake the game and the nation alike.

Six years after Jackie Robinson smashed the sport's color barrier that year, still fewer than 10 African-Americans played in the big leagues. Even as white America slowly broadened its thinking and Brown v. Board of Education legally ended separate but equal laws in 1954, the Red Sox obstinately clung to segregation until 1959.

It wasn't until 1975 that 27 percent of MLB players were African-American.

Over the course of 28 years, baseball transformed from all white to a representative mix of the nation it thrived in. The landscape has changed so much that today a pressing question for the league is how to get more African-American players after numbers dwindled over the decades.

There was a time, even while pioneers like Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Wilma Rudolph were winning Olympic medals in the 1930s and 1960 and before Title IX in 1972 legislation legalized equal opportunity for females in public funding of athletics, that women were widely discouraged, if not banned, from playing sports because of antiquated stereotypes about fragility.

Over the course of 40-plus years, the idea of females and sports transformed from the novel to the accepted and, as women's rights advocates see it, into leadership roles outside of sports, such as business and politics.

There was also a time, before Monday, before NBA veteran Jason Collins became the first openly gay active male athlete in a major professional American sport, that the conventional wisdom held that a homosexual man in a locker room would be so divisive that it would be destructive to the concept of team.

It has been less than a week. But just as it has been for race and for gender and other social issues, as time passes and societal thinking shifts, the presence of gay players will become ubiquitous, you scarcely will be able to remember the time when it was controversial.

Time and again, pioneers in sport and society both have reflected and impacted each other.

Sure, prominent people like politicians and actors have come out. Even other athletes in team sports, such as the WNBA's Brittney Griner and retired NBA player John Amaechi, acknowledged their homosexuality as did former tennis stars Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova.

It's also clear the timing was right for not only Collins but also the sporting world and the world at large for Collins to reveal his sexual identity. The military revoked Don't Ask Don't Tell and same-sex marriage has passed in 10 states. Indeed, superstars like Kobe Bryant almost immediately voiced their support of Collins after his first-person Sports Illustrated article was released.

Athletes, especially those playing the most popular of American sports, have a special platform that can fast-track the exception into the norm when it comes to social issues, historians say.

"Sports can be one of the most powerful conduits for change," said Matthew Briones, a professor at the University of Chicago who teaches a course called Baseball and American Culture. "The immediate, emotional and visceral reaction that sports play can be powerful. Sports reach across all socio-economic groups. They cut across different racial groups. It has such a platform that it really is global."

In front of a vast audience, athletes not only are humanized but mythologized. A gay athlete playing on your favorite team makes it harder to rationalize ostracizing your neighbor or co-worker who might be homosexual.

All-American Jerry Harkness noticed as much when he starred on Loyola's 1963 team that featured four black starters and made history by playing an all-white Mississippi State squad that had been banned from playing integrated teams.

That same year NAACP leader Medgar Evers was murdered, four African-American girls were killed in a targeted black Alabama church bombing and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The Ramblers won the NCAA tournament championship that season. That didn't mean they were embraced immediately. Harkness noticed stereotypes of black players — that they're poor teammates, for example — start to fall away.

"Mississippi started to turn around," he told the Tribune this week. "It was, 'We're not going to ever use (black players). We'll never socialize with them.' That whole theory started to break down. It took sports. Cracks start forming in their theories."

Some take exception to comparing the gay rights movement to the civil rights struggle of blacks. In a survey commissioned by BET founder Robert Johnson, African-Americans oppose the comparison 2-to-1.

But teams obviously want to win. It's easier to do so when you don't exclude significant portions of available players.

Team owners and their executives will come to the same conclusion in the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB as more gay players follow Collins' example and publicly acknowledge their sexual orientation.

And fans of these teams who object to openly gay players will be forced to alter either their perceptions or their allegiances. That's how this works.

It happened after Magic Johnson revealed his HIV-positive status in 1991. Initially, players such as Karl Malone vehemently stated that he would not play against Johnson.

On 1992's Olympic Dream Team, Malone was Johnson's teammate.

Like Collins, Johnson's announcement sparked a national dialogue. Olympic diver Greg Louganis came out as gay and HIV-positive in 1994 in hopes of educating the public on the virus that once was thought to be a contagious death sentence.

"We open the doors for communication," Louganis said. "There would be debate going on, education happening. It got people thinking, it got people talking, and not burying our heads in the sand surrounding a very devastating issue."

The hope gay rights advocates have in the wake of Collins' announcement is similar.

Students in Briones' University of Chicago class see parallels between Collins' coming out and other sports pioneers who have contributed to social movements.

"I don't think it's political correctness," he said. "I think they get this is the civil rights movement of their generation."